Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [9]
“Eddie Bondo,” she tried out loud, carefully looking away from him, out at the sky-blue nothing ahead. “I don’t know you from Adam. But you could stay one night in my cabin if you didn’t want to sleep in the woods.”
He didn’t turn loose of her fingers after that.
Together they took the trail back into the woods with this new thing between them, their clasped hands, alive with nerve endings like some fresh animal born with its own volition, pulling them forward. She felt as if all her senses had been doubled as she watched this other person, and watched what he saw. He ducked under low branches and held them with his free hand so they wouldn’t snap back in her face. They were moving close together, suddenly seeing for the first time today the miracle that two months of rain and two days of spring heat could perform on a forest floor. It had burst out in mushrooms: yellow, red, brown, pink, deadly white, minuscule, enormous, delicate, and garish, they painted the ground and ran up the sides of trees with their sudden, gilled flesh. Their bulbous heads pushed up through the leaf mold, announcing the eroticism of a fecund woods at the height of spring, the beginning of the world. She knelt down in the leaf mold to show him adder’s tongue, tiny yellow lilies with bashful back-curved petals and leaves mottled like a copperhead’s back. He reached down beside her knees to touch another flower she’d overlooked and nearly crushed. “Look at this,” he said.
“Oh, look at that,” she echoed almost in a whisper. “A lady’s slipper.” The little pink orchid was growing here where she knew it ought to be, where the soil was sweetened by pines. She moved aside to spare it and saw more like it, dozens of delicately wrinkled oval pouches held erect on stems, all the way up the ridge. She pressed her lips together, inclined to avert her eyes from so many pink scrota.
“Who named it that?” he asked, and laughed—they both did—at whoever had been the first to pretend this flower looked like a lady’s slipper and not a man’s testicles. But they both touched the orchid’s veined flesh, gingerly, surprised by its cool vegetable texture.
“The bee must go in here,” she said, touching the opening below the crown of narrow petals where the pollinator would enter the pouch. He leaned close to look, barely brushing her forehead with the dark corona of his hair. She was surprised by his interest in the flower, and by her own acute physical response to his body held so offhandedly close to hers. She could smell the washed-wool scent of his damp hair and the skin above his collar. This dry ache she felt was deeper than hunger—more like thirst. Her heart beat hard and she wondered, had she offered him a dry place to sleep, was that what he thought? Was that really all she had meant? She was not sure she could bear all the hours of an evening and a night spent close to him in her tiny cabin, wanting, not touching. Could not survive being discarded again as she had been by her husband at the end, with his looking through her in the bedroom for his glasses or his keys, even when she was naked, her body a mere obstruction, like a stranger in a theater blocking his view of the movie. She was too old, about to make a fool of herself, surely. This Eddie Bondo up close was a boy, ferociously beautiful and not completely out of his twenties.
He sat back and looked at her, thinking. Surprised her again with what he said. “There’s something up north like this, grows in the peat bogs.”
She felt unsettled by each new presence of him, the modulations of his voice, the look of his fingers as they touched this flower, his knowledge of peat bogs she had never seen. She couldn’t take her eyes from the close white crescents of his nails at the tips of his fingers, the fine lines in his weathered hands. She had to force herself to speak.
“Lady’s slippers up there? Where, in Canada?”
“It’s not this same flower, but it traps bugs. The bee smells something sweet and goes inside and then he’s trapped